So Robert Plant, one-time swaggering, full-throated Led Zeppelin frontman who wore impossibly tight jeans, what are you doing this weekend?

Mads Perch

Robert Plant releases new album Carry Fire

“I’m heading to Burton-on-Trent to watch the Wolves play away,” he laughs, throwing back his shaggy mane of greying blond curls.

The main thing that sets 69-year-old Plant apart from most of his peers is that he keeps his feet on terra firma.

The life-long Wolves fan, and honorary club vice-president along with his heroes Steve Bull and Ron Flowers, is loving the current Championship season.

His gold and black team are sitting pretty at the top of the table... “although we did lose miserably to Sheffield Wednesday,” he’s at pains to point out.

Mads Perch

The worldly-wise Carry Fire is the singer's first release since 2014

“And the guy who scored was an ex-Wolves player we couldn’t wait to get rid of!”

Plant’s love of the beautiful game yields this telling insight: “Music is almost an intimacy that I creep back into.

“It’s for the other me that has always existed in parallel to this happy-go-lucky football fan, proud dad and now proud grandfather.”

No doubt his trip to Burton was accompanied by a pint or three of the local ale, for the singer has always preferred beer and boozers to anything more salubrious.

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Plant's new album features a duet with musical soulmate Chrissie Hynde

These days he’s partial to a drop of Neck Oil, a popular craft beer produced by his son Logan’s rapidly expanding Beavertown outfit.

“Neck Oil is my favourite one of his. That’s called the session beer, a gentle five per cent, but there’s a really good one called Gamma Ray with a bit more bang to it,” he informs me.

“My son makes a lot of beer these days. He can’t stop. He, like me, is surrounded by fantastic people and makes for a great front man.

“He may be there at the vanguard of this (craft beer) stuff along with his pals but his dedication to variety and taste is insane.”

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Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in their Led Zeppelin heyday

Widening the chat to all his offspring, he adds: “It’s a good family. The kids are following their dreams and they’re ably doing it under their own steam. They could wait for me to croak... but that’s not happening.”

I’m meeting Plant in his North London local, naturally, to mull over his latest album, the richly atmospheric, worldly-wise Carry Fire, his first since 2014’s Lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar.

It’s the latest chapter in his forward-facing career and explains why a Led Zeppelin nostalgia fest remains an unlikely prospect.

This time out, his band the Sensational Space Shifters led by long-time cohort Justin Adams, are joined by folk singer and fiddle maestro Seth Lakeman on three tracks.

“Seth’s brought cheer and eloquence,” says Plant.

“And also his knowledge of folk music, which means he can teach us some stuff. It’s not exactly Fairport Convention!”

There’s also a distinct Bristol vibe because of that city’s trip-hop pioneers like Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky.

“It’s all the trippy s**t, the drum and bass stuff,” says Plant.

“Bristol’s a very lucky place to come from, a real 21st century city. There’s more of a rub between black and white music.”

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The vocalist is unashamed that love is a familiar theme in his work

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Plant is a huge Wolves fan and an honorary club vice-president

Carry Fire also bears the influence of another of Plant’s haunts, rural Wales, with scenery that summons mysticism, romanticism and love of nature.

This harks back to the bucolic atmosphere of Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp from Led Zeppelin III, named after a cottage he shared with Page to get away from the mayhem.

He says: “My latest contributions were conceived along those small rivers on the Welsh borders, the Arrow, the Lugg and the Teme. Those places unlock me, open me up.

“I drove down from Aberystwyth yesterday and for the first two hours I was in raptures. I had my dog in the back and we had the windows open and I thought, ‘Look at this, it’s heaven.’

“You follow the Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons and the colours and the resonance changes your mood.”

Plant is and has always been a hopeless romantic and this is borne out by ethereal new ballad Dance With You Tonight.

Like so many songwriters, he’s unashamed that love is a familiar theme in his work. “One of the best ones was Rain Song in Zeppelin,” he says.

“Because it was so beautiful, the music just told me what to write.”

Yet on Carry Fire, there’s a new element to Plant’s lyricism, created by his dismay at a world going off the rails.

It’s not overt finger-pointing but it demonstrates this restless man of the world has serious questions about what’s going on.

He describes Carving Up The World Again... as a “very quick glimpse at what we’ve had to do because we have no faith in mankind. We’re strange animals because we can do so much good.

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Led Zeppelin have graced many a stadium with their huge sound

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Plant in a Wolves kit for a charity match

Mads Perch

There is a new element to Plant’s lyricism, created by his dismay at a world going off the rails

“I heard this morning that someone is intent on colonising Mars, the red planet, and yet if that’s possible, how come we’re not able to take in the ebb and flow of humanity, brother to brother, side by side, the different languages? We haven’t got things right so people are ready to bail.”

More questions are posed on the fired-up Bones Of Saints which looks at who buys the bullets, who sells the guns. “And yet we know very well that if there were no armament factories, nothing would be happening,” says Plant.

“We have to watch it all like some prolonged TV serial... somebody in an opium den somewhere writing the next episode.”

Another song, New World, is about “colonialism, imperialism” and speaks for all humanity yet was specifically inspired by Plant’s time in Austin, Texas, where he lived with then girlfriend, singer Patty Griffin.

There he learned about the plight of the Comanche people and their leader, Quanah Parker, how they were driven out of Texas to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which then became a massive US military base.

Plant found visiting the fort “a crippling” experience.

“In the middle of it all, past the McDonald’s and the movie halls and once you’ve gone through the wire fences and presented your passport, you come to the graves of the Apache scouts.

“There you will also find the grave of Quanah Parker yet nobody from his tribe can visit because of where it is.”

Finally, we return to Plant’s own situation, what drives this single-minded artist.

“You know, this is not a career,” he says.

“It’s an assembly of remarkable gifts and experiences.

“If I’m going to weave some words around three or four-minute pieces of music, it’s got to be what’s going on in me and around me.

“I’ve tried a lot of guises as a man and it’s been like having a wardrobe of attempted personality changes.

“They’ve all had great flurries and flushes... then sometimes the wheel spins...”

I can’t help interjecting: “You really have had an amazing life.”

“Apparently,” he replies.

“I’d like to find out what the f*** has been going on!”

ROBERT PLANT Carry Fire

1. The May Queen
2. New World...
3. Season’s Song
4. Dance With You Tonight
5. Carving Up The World Again...A Wall And Not A Fence
6. A Way With Words
7. Carry Fire
8. Bones Of Saints
9. Keep It Hid
10. Bluebirds Over The Mountain
11. Heaven Sent